Too old for new furniture?

I’ve always thought about tying our living room decor together someday by adding a set of small matching couches. We can afford to do it and were finally ready to start looking recently when it hit us. Not tomorrow, but probably in just a few years, we’ll be moving to a smaller place and no doubt needing to ditch much of our current furniture.

We surely won’t have a family room then so we’ll already have one extra couch. Do we really want to have three extra sofas?

And what about that beautiful long dining table we’d always dreamed of buying so we wouldn’t need to push a wobbly table next to our lovely but small oval antique dining table whenever we host more than six people?

Nope, nix that, too. Our dining table is actually round, but we have room to comfortably keep the leaf in. It will probably need to stay round in a new place and we‘ll have to put the leaf in the closet (yikes, assuming we’ll even have enough closet space for it).

Jeez. It’s bad enough that as we age we have to consider various physical aspects and their implications for the kinds of travel we choose. But, c’mon, our furniture, too?

But when I look around the house now and think about purchases we’ve talked about in the past, I consider them through a different lens. Would that fit in a smaller bedroom? If a future “office” has to double as a guest room, how many desks do two retired people really need?

My husband has always wanted a king-size bed, and our mattress is starting to age out. We’d need to replace our queen-size headboard and frame, too. Our master bedroom is large and would easily accommodate it, but a king-size bed would take up a lot of room in what’s sure to be a much smaller bedroom in any downsized digs.

It would all be obvious if we were getting ready to move, of course, or even looking to put our house on the market as a couple of friends have recently done. But we’re only in the peri-downsize stage and I never realized what a reality check it is.

I feel the same way these days about clothing.

The “business casual” outfits I haven’t needed since I retired have been in the back of my closet for years, of course. But now when I look at my dressy clothes that I’ve been saving for weddings and bar mitzvahs …

We don’t have friends who are getting married anymore (not even second marriages), and we usually don’t go to their kids’ weddings. The last bat mitzvah we attended was probably 20 years ago. And what used to be considered a “fancy” restaurant rarely even has a dress code anymore.

It’s a treat to have an excuse to get dressed up, but I have more than enough options in the closet now. I’m working up to getting rid of some of them, but surely, I know now not to buy new ones.

But still, how I’d love to go into a trendy dress shop and try on that slinky dress in the window. And what a kick it would be to go to an inviting furniture showroom and pick out that set of couches or that long farmhouse table.

Is this really the depressing existential problem it feels like on some days or is it just another one of those first-world problems we’re so very fortunate to have?

A version of this story first appeared in Crow's Feet: Life as We Age, on Medium.com.